First times seeing a new promotion

[LaGoosh]

Like I'm assuming many of you, my first experiences with wrestling were WWF and I was exclusively a WWF fan for years. This wasn't because of any modern day tribalism type behaviour. I just didn't have access to anything that wasn't Raw. So when I finally did get around to seeing other wrestling my reactions were pretty strong.

Firstly, WCW. I came into wrestling at Survivor Series 98 so I was a peak WWF Attitude era fan and all I knew about WCW was from crowd signs at Raw saying it sucked. When I finally did see WCW it was either first or second episode they showed on Channel 5.

The first thing that struck me was visually it looked so weird to me. Compared to the vibrant and energetic production of Raw, WCW seemed so dull, flat and boring. The ring looked and sounded wrong - the bumps had less impact. Everyone looked weirdly dated with late 80s/early 90s haircuts and fashion. I have vague memories of the matches. I remember a Prince Iaukea match started it off, I think he was maybe wrestling Disco Inferno. Both gimmicks were really cheesy. It was not a good start. There was a cruiserweight match with two luchadors I can't remember who they were, Psicosis may have been one of them. I remember they did a big flippy dive to the outside that blew my mind as you didn't see that stuff in WWF at the time but the rest of the match was pretty dull. And the main event was Hulk Hogan vs Macho Man and it was exactly the type of match you'd expect them to have in WCW at that time and it was so boring and shit I couldn't believe it. Hogan had an extended heat segment where he whipped Macho Man with his belt. How they could put this stuff on TV with a straight face when you had Stone Cold and The Rock main-eventing on the other channel I'll never understand. So not a good experience. I kept watching every week just because I was wrestling obsessed back then but it wasn't till years later that I thought of WCW as anything other than utter shite.

My experience seeing ECW was much different. The first ECW I saw was an episode of Hardcore TV on Bravo one of my mates taped for me because we didn't have cable. I was getting into rock/nu-metal at the time so something that looked like a scuzzy grimy metal underground show was instantly appealing. This was around the time period where Rhino piledrove/piledrived(?) Lori Fullington off the apron through a table which was such an insane spot and they showed multiple replays off it throughout to really sell it. I think it was the first thing they showed actually so I was pretty instantly hooked in. There were three matches but I only remember two of them. The first was Da Baldies vs Kid Kash, Danny Doring and Roadkill. I've watched this back since and it's your pretty forgettable standard 2000s ECW lower card spotfest but at the time I was blown away by it. They were doing so many crazy moves that I hadn't seen before. I came out of it thinking Da Baldies were brilliant and should be mega stars. The second match was Sandman vs W*NG Kanameura which popped the bubble a bit as it was sloppy and terrible. I was baffled by this at the time because I couldn't understand why they had two people in street clothes who didn't look like they knew how to wrestle out there putting on a match. Sadly I have no idea what the main event was but the best moment of the show which I can vividly remember is there was a music video for Justin Credible set to a cover of Prong's "Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck" and I came out of it thinking Justin Credible, of all people, was the coolest wrestler ever. I was a fan of him for years and I think it was pretty much due entirely to that music video. After this episode of Hardcore TV I was pretty desperate to see more ECW and snapped up Anarchy Rulz 99 as soon as it turned up in the Croydon HMV.

Thought it might be interesting to hear about any of your first impressions/experiences seeing new promotions for the first time. 

[HarmonicGenerator]

WCW for me was a Friday night on Channel 5 at my mate’s house. I remember Misfits In Action, and Major Gunns. That’s about it. I didn’t watch it a second time.

I can’t remember first time ‘seeing’ ECW but my first exposure to it was pictures in Powerslam (Tajiri), videos in the bargain bin in WHSmith (Steve Corino, Terry Funk’s 1997 retirement) and descriptions in Mick Foley’s book (Mikey Whipwreck, Funk again). I did end up buying a couple of those videos, but that’ll have been after WWE bought them out. I can’t remember if I first watched those, or if it was through a WWE DVD release.

Most other promotions - it’s a big thank you to The Wrestling Channel. NOAH, New Japan, ROH, TNA, World of Sport etc.

AEW - I’d heard about the first All In and Double Or Nothing on here, but didn’t commit to watching until Dynamite started and they announced it’d be on ITV. ITV! I was away in London for work and decided to stay up late and watch the first episode on the hotel wifi… and it didn’t show up. Refresh, refresh, nothing. I then found out that while AEW was going to be on ITV, it would be on a few days’ delay. So I didn’t see it until that weekend. I kept going with the ITV thing until at least 2021 when I gave in and finally got Fite!

[Your Fight Site]

Obligatory The Wrestling Channel comment.

I grew up watching WCW WorldWide on Channel 5 and WWF Sunday Night Heat on Channel 4. We didn’t have Sky, so pretty much lost access to wrestling when WCW folded and the WWF moved to Sky.

My dad did later on get Sky, and when TWC launched, I just remember being completely enamoured being able to watch all these events and promotions that were legend to me due to only ever reading about them on the Internet or in Powerslam magazine. When TNA launched on TWC, that then filled my void for American-style pro wrestling with names I was more familiar with. It was such an easy watch as well, with the early episodes of iMPACT! being a one-hour weekly watch, and then the PPVs being available as well. I didn’t mind them being weeks out of date either, as was used to that with WorldWide. I was just happy to be able to watch wrestling again.

[RedTwoster]

Really great topic and post.

My first exposure to non-WWE wrestling was also The Wrestling Channel. I started watching in late 02, meaning I completely missed WCW and ECW.

I tried watching the Japanese wrestling that they aired, but I couldn’t get into it because of the lack of English commentary.

I watched TNA though, and I had mixed feelings about it. I loved the X Division, but the first show I saw had a lot of bad in it too. It grew on me though, even if I did consider it a step down from Smackdown until the original Scott D’Amore years of Impact, which I thought were great.

The first time I saw ROH was a major letdown. I was young, and it wasn’t so much the lower production values that was off-putting, it was the quality of the mics they used at the time. I genuinely couldn’t understand what the wrestlers were saying, so I didn’t keep watching it. 

My first experience of AEW was probably Fyter Fest or something - it was one of the early shows that didn’t become a full PPV (I think). It leant heavily on being a parody of Fyre Fest, and I didn’t like it at all. My first impression of Kenny Omega as a result was a bit underwhelming. I do remember liking Goldenboy on commentary, though. 

During the early days of Dynamite, I remember it being kind of bad - the surprise debut of Jake Hager, the Dark Order being treated as a genuine threat and a rubbish women’s division. But when Tony Khan took over the booking, things improved rapidly and it became my favourite wrestling promotion by quite some way. Although things slumped for a bit, it’s now back to its best, and I love that. When AEW is firing on all cylinders, it’s untouchable.

[BomberPat]

My experiences were very similar to LaGoosh's, by the sounds of it.

I never really watched WCW while it was around. My first spate of wrestling fandom was all WWF, and it was around '93/'94, intermittently watching what I could catch on TV, but petering out by '97 at the latest. My parents and my older brother hated wrestling, so it must have been very rare that I ever got chance to watch it uninterrupted, and I never had any videos or toys or anything. In that time I might have seen clips or adverts for WCW when I was watching Cartoon Network, maybe when it ticked over to TNT in the afternoon, but I definitely never watched it and had weird ideas about what it was - I was a kid, and hadn't really got my head around what wrestling was and who was who yet. I knew who Hulk Hogan was, but he wasn't on the shows I was watching, so I figured there was some other wrestling out there, but how that worked I had no idea. Occasionally in the Beano or the Dandy, especially older annuals that I'd got from my brothers, there would be jokes about Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks, so in my head I reasoned that they must have wrestled in The Other Place along with Hogan.

I don't think I actually saw any WCW until 2000. That was the year I got back into wrestling, via Smackdown on the PS1, in a story I've probably told a million times. By Summerslam 2000, I was absolutely hooked, and wanted to know everything I could about wrestling; mates were lending me videos and old WWF games, and I was buying whatever wrestling magazines I could, and books like The Idiot's Guide To Wrestling, and this weird photobook about the biggest stars in wrestling history that seemed to be pretty arbitrary, given it included the entire Dudley "family" as one entry. I wish I could remember what that was cooled, I think it might have been connected to WOW Magazine? So the magazines and these books, and occasionally playing one or two of the WCW games, gave me a sense of who some of the wrestlers in WCW were, but it being 2000, it all felt very low rent and I had no interest in actually watching it. I remember catching an episode of some WCW show on Channel 5, and finding it almost incomprehensibly bad - which, in fairness, it probably was.

A mate who was really excited that I was getting into wrestling lent me some of his videos to try and get me up to date with stuff; it was mostly WWF stuff from early 2000, right before I started watching, but also the Saturday Night's Main Event with the Hogan/Boss Man cage match, and then Starrcade '93. I think that must have been the first WCW show I watched all the way through - even though by the time I watched it, it might have even been after the WWF bought the company. It was the first time I saw WCW from that era, the first time I saw them before I had started to see them as just the place that all the old blokes who left the WWF went to. The Flair/Vader retirement match angle was brilliant, and I'd started to see enough WWF Classics stuff on TV that I knew who the likes of Rick Rude and Ricky Steamboat were, and having wrestlers like Steve Austin and Steven Regal on the card helped me get into it too.

I'd be lying if I said I became a WCW guy overnight, because there wasn't really any clear route to becoming a WCW guy at that point, but it's that era of WCW that I have the most affection for. I was always weirdly contrary as a kid; when people were collecting Pogs, I started getting all the weird off-brand knock-offs more than the official stuff, and when Pokémon cards were all the rage I was collecting Digimon, so I could definitely see myself having become a WCW diehard just because everyone else said it was the lesser brand. 



ECW - in 2000 it was getting namedropped on WWF TV quite a bit, between Heyman coming in, fans chanting it, and ex-ECW names jumping ship, so I was aware of its existence, and it had a kind of playground reputation as being more "real" than the WWF or WCW. It being 2000, I came into the WWF right as the build for the first TLC was happening, and the Hardcore division was at its height, and being a moody goth kid, Raven had quickly become one of my favourites, so I was pretty well predisposed to love ECW. The big gamechanger was reading Mick Foley's first book, which is what really opened my eyes to the existence of wrestling outside of the "Big Three", of wrestling in Japan, the independents, the whole works, but it also really fleshed out my understanding of ECW. Like LaGoosh, one of if not the first ECW show I watched had clips of Rhino piledriving Lori Fullington off the ring apron and, like LaGoosh, Justin Credible had an outsized role in my understanding of ECW - one of the steps towards me getting into it was a preview of one of the ECW PS1 games in a Playstation magazine, and the accompanying photo for the article was of Justin Credible with his kendo stick, and that combined with my nascent ideas of what ECW was made me think he must be great. As I was only really aware of ECW through magazine coverage and reputation, everything pointed towards him being a big star. In fact, there was a Portuguese lad who lived near me, and we'd get the same schoolbus, and he would ask me questions about wrestling as I had started following it more intensely by this time, and he had heard Justin Credible had showed up in the WWF and he asked me who he was. I said he was one of the biggest stars in ECW, and he came back the next week super disappointed in me, because I had said he was one of the biggest ECW guys, and he was just a little bloke - he had taken "biggest" a little too literally!

I ended up buying every ECW video I could get my hands on in HMV, and I don't really know how I managed it as a scrawny teenager who couldn't possibly pass for 18 when all the videos were 18 rated. I just can't remember how I came to own so many of them under those circumstances, and it can't be that I bought that many after I turned 18, because by that point ECW had been dead several years and I doubt HMV was stocking VHS any more! But it meant that I watched ECW completely out of order, jumping from '98 to 2000 to '95 just depending on what was available. 

 

Everything post-ECW is more or less the same story; I was following wrestling online by that point, and just keeping aware of everything else going on. The Wrestling Channel helped. Powerslam got me into the FWA. But mostly it was internet buzz or going down rabbit holes and just finding whatever I could; often with Foley's book as a guide, some of my earliest online wrestling memories outside of checking results on the WWF website was of waiting an age for grainy RealPlayer videos to download so I could see thirty second clips of mad FMW deathmatches and CZW high spots.

[DEF]

 

WWF was first for me. I slept over at friends house and they had Wrestlemania 6 taped off sky. Must have been a couple of years after it though. Hogan Vs Warrior is still one of my favourite matches.

First WCW was one of the ITV Saturday afternoon shows in the early 90s. All I really remember from it was Dave Sullivan coming out as Hogan's biggest fan boy so I guess around 1994. However in 92 I was in a newsagents next to a ASDA whilst my Mum did the weekly shop and I distinctly remember my mate bullshiting about how they actually killed Abdullah the Butcher as we stared at the cover of WCW magazine.

Fast forward to ECW. First exposure was almost certainly Power Slam. First viewing was Guilty As Charged 1999 which I think was one of the first VHS releases from Delta video before they dubbed all the music over. I was hooked pretty quickly.

At FWA British Uprising 1 at the York Hall I bought a VHS from one of the tape traders of the weekly TNA PPVS. I want to say it was two weeks on one tape around week 30ish but it could have been earlier.

FWA shows were responsible for my seeing ROH, NJPW, CZW and many many others from the tape traders come to think of it.

AEW I was all in (see what I did there) from the start. So much so I took a firestick on Holiday to Italy so I could watch DON live on Triller. Actually paid for it twice as well. Didn't realise pre ordering it in the UK wouldn't be recognised in a different region.

Edited June 6, 2025 by DEF

[Lorne Malvo]

WWF - Undertaker killing some jobber on a VHS my brother owned in about 1994. Then went years without seeing anything else, until we got Sky in around 2000. I think I started properly watching during the 'who ran over Stone Cold' storyline, which was probably awful looking back but I loved at the time. I distinctly remember shitting myself because The Rock had to defend the WWF title again Kane on an episode of Smackdown - how could he possibly survive?! Ah, to be young and innocent.

WCW - Much like LaGoosh, the shitty Channel 5 show with the Batman 'BAM' effects. All I can remember is Booker T, Vince Russo and Shane Douglas were on this particular episode. I thought it was awful and didn't watch again.

ECW - Again, much like LaGoosh. An episode of ECW on Bravo (Friday night, I want to say? The same night WCW would air on channel 5) and my main takeaway from the episode was that Justin Credible was fucking briliant. I think I bought into ECW instantly because my brother hit me with the 'most wrestling is fake but this is real!' line. 

TNA - Caught it on TWC round a mates house. Pretty sure it was Raven in his daft Clockwork Orange gimmick match against someone. I was a fully paid-up WWE fan at this point and thought TNA was crap, didn't check it out again until around 2005/2006.

ROH/PWG - Throwing these together because it would've been about 2005/06 when I first checked out both. The same friend who showed me TNA was a massive IWC guy and would order DVDs every month from Highspots/etc, and let me borrow them afterwards. I thought ROH had some fantastic wrestlers (Danielson/Punk) but a lot of dullness, whereas PWG was much more my jam. Really fun promotion with some great matches/characters. He also showed me NOAH which I thought was immensely boring.

Said friend went on to be Chris Brookes who now wrestles around the world but mostly in Japan for DDT. Don't much speak to him anymore but it's genuinely great to see someone live their dream.

AEW - Their first show, Double or Nothing 2019. I'd stopped watching WWE for the first time in 19 years after that year's Mania, so this came along at the right time for me. Have since watched everything they've put out - every single Dynamite, Dark, Rampage, Elevation. Even that womens tournament they did exclusively on Youtube which featured Excalibur commentating solo in what looked like someones basement. Tony Khan ought to send me a certificate.

[wandshogun09]

It’s all hazy to me but I’m almost certain my first time seeing wrestling was WCW Worldwide on ITV in 1992. Fuzzy memories of the Michael Hayes/Jimmy Garvin version of the Freebirds, Ron Simmons squashing some poor sod and a Rick Rude vs Dustin Rhodes match. We didn’t have Sky back then so an hour of WCW a week on ITV on Saturday afternoons was probably my lot for a bit.

I’m not 100% sure when I first saw WWF. I know my first WWF tape was SummerSlam 89 and I vividly remember my Dad coming home from work with it. I put it on and saw the familiar faces of Tony Schiavone and Jesse Ventura in the opening of the show and, because they were the regular commentators on WCW at the time, I guess I just assumed they were the commentators on all wrestling. The Hart Foundation vs Brain Busters opener instantly got me hooked and I still love that match to this day. I also have a strong memory of being round a mate’s house who had Sky (or Satellite as we called it) and WWF was on. Think it was Prime Time in the run up to SummerSlam 92 and I remember that Bret vs Model match where Shawn Michaels comes out and causes a DQ. Not sure whether that came first or the SummerSlam 89 tape but I just remember being blown away by how much brighter and more vibrant everything looked than the Greg Valentine and Marcus Alexander Bagwell matches I’d been watching on WCW up to that point.

ECW - I guess like most in the UK, my first exposure was through their ‘invasion’ in the WWF in late 96/early 97 and the Barely Legal PPV being promoted on Raw and stuff. Taz dumping Mikey Whipwreck on his head in the Manhattan Center, Sabu falling off the Raw sign, RVD vs Jeff Hardy etc. Also remember Chris Candido popping up against Brian Christopher and actually thinking ‘Skip finally got rid of them stupid blue pants’. It seemed edgy and exciting but I had no way of watching really. Few years later I finally started getting hold of the Delta DVDs off Amazon. Still remember reading all the reviews before making my first order. I wanted to choose wisely. Still clearly recall my first order, based on reviews, was Barely Legal, Heatwave 98, Anarchy Rulz 99 and Guilty As Charged 2001 just because it was the last PPV. I was blown away and started building up a collection after that.

I really got into Japanese wrestling as well as a kid. My introduction to that would’ve been through the New Japan on Eurosport coverage in the early-mid 90s. Or ‘World Superstars Of Wrestling’ or ‘WSW: Ring Warriors’ as it was referred to by commentators Craig DeGeorge and/or Gordon Solie and Sir Oliver Humperdink.

As an early 90s WCW fan I was always aware of New Japan. The likes of Muta, Liger, Chono and Sasaki were all over the cards in 1992. But I never thought much of it beyond them just being guys who showed up in WCW a lot. I remember my Dad taking me to school one morning and saying he’d taped me some wrestling the night before, it wasn’t WWF or WCW but that Vader and Bam Bam Bigelow were on it. I couldn’t concentrate at school all day wondering what this could be. Got home and watched it and, sure enough, there they were. Think Vader vs Hashimoto was one match, which was about as hard hitting a match as I’d ever seen at the time. I thought it might actually be real. And then Bam Bam popped up, with the graphic saying ‘Scott Vigelow’. I started watching Eurosport’s ‘WSW’ a lot from then on and the names thing became a regular source of amusement for me. This is where I began to really love the Junior/Cruiserweight style as well. Got to see a lot more of Liger, who I’d only seen against Pillman in WCW previously. And then the likes of Otani (who I loved), El Samurai, Benoit, Malenko and Black Tiger Eddie.

All Japan I didn’t really get to see at all until later when I started getting into tape trading. Got big time into the whole Misawa, Kobashi, Kawada, Taue stuff and loved seeing the big American hard cases I was familiar with from early 90s WCW like Hansen, Dr Death and Gordy kicking arse over there as well.  

The rest like TNA and ROH and stuff, it was The Wrestling Channel where I first saw all that stuff. 

[DCW]

I remember clubbing together with my pals to buy Summerslam 98 and watching it live in one of my friends house at a sleepover for my friends birthday. Would have been 10 in 98. I was hooked on WWF from then,  but I could only watch the Sky One censored version Saturday morning SD!, the wrap up shows like Superstars/Metal on Sunday and Heat on C4. I watched consistently until about 03, when it became apparent that no one was replacing Austin/Rock/Foley besides reign of terror Triple H. 

I never really watched WCW as we'd no access to it at home. My annoying cousin up north had Bravo, so I'd watch WCW whenever I'd be dispatched up there during the summer holidays. Remember him loving the filthy animals, who looked dull as feck to my WWF propaganda brainwashed brain vs DX, Dudleys, Hardys, Too Cool etc. 

Same story with ECW. I bought one PPV VHS  in HMV (RVD v Scotty Anton is only match I can remember off it) but the dinginess / poor production vs shiny WWF didn't really do much for me either. Again, WWF brainwashing really worked!

[RedTwoster]

1 hour ago, DEF said:

FWA shows were responsible for my seeing ROH, NJPW, CZW and many many others from the tape traders come to think of it.

FWA!! That reminds me - the first non-WWE match I ever saw was FWA on The Wrestling Channel. James Tighe was wrestling, I can’t remember who he was wrestling, but he really stood out to me and young Twoster thought he was the most incredible wrestler I’d ever seen - so much so that I immediately signed him on EWR and made him WWE Champion. 

[LaGoosh]

2 hours ago, BomberPat said:

waiting an age for grainy RealPlayer videos to download so I could see thirty second clips of mad FMW deathmatches and CZW high spots.

That takes me back. By 2002/3 I had pretty much lost interest in WWF and turned into an indie forum wanker (CZWFans represent). There was a German guy called DXD who ran a CZW fan site where he posted loads of cool music videos of the various hardcore matches. I was pretty hooked on CZW for awhile after that. The grass roots DIY grimy astethic mixed with absolute insane bumps, crazy brawls and weirdo scumbag wrestlers was very exciting at a time WWF was a bit of a mess. Hard to be 16 years old and interested in Kane vs Triple H or whatever when CZW was putting on the first Tournament of Death. 

[Jesse]

2 hours ago, RedTwoster said:

FWA!! That reminds me - the first non-WWE match I ever saw was FWA on The Wrestling Channel. James Tighe was wrestling, I can’t remember who he was wrestling, but he really stood out to me and young Twoster thought he was the most incredible wrestler I’d ever seen - so much so that I immediately signed him on EWR and made him WWE Champion. 

If you're anything like me that could well have been the James Tighe/Paul London match at Frontiers of Honor 2003 - which I'm relatively sure was my first viewing of either FWA or ROH
 

 

[RedTwoster]

4 hours ago, Jesse said:

If you're anything like me that could well have been the James Tighe/Paul London match at Frontiers of Honor 2003 - which I'm relatively sure was my first viewing of either FWA or ROH
 

 

Amazingly I actually think it was. It would explain why I stopped and watched it - Paul London was one of the highest rated wrestlers in EWR, so to use a Championship Manager analogy, it would have been a bit like setting the chance to see Kennedy Bakircioglu in the flesh. Whatever the case, I’ve definitely seen this match, and it’s like one giant dose of deja vu, watching it back. Cheers for posting that, I’m a bit astounded that you worked this out. 

[Snitsky's back acne]

My first experience of ECW was Powerslam magazine. Photos and written show reports. In an era where we were getting Dungeon of Doom in WCW seeing photos of the Axl Rotten v Ian Rotten Taipei Death Match was insane. It sounded crazy too - they run a dingy little building? They fight all over the building? They smash people through tables? I had to see this. I remember finding a tape trader in the back of Powerslam and got a couple of ECW shows through the post - November to Remember 1995 and a double of Hardcore Heaven 1995 and Extreme Warfare Volume 1. My mind 14 year old mind was blown when I saw the shows - they were so edgy and grown up in comparison to the kid-friendly WCW and WWF. It felt like I was watching an 18 film. 

[ReturnOfTheMack]

WCW I first saw in the early 90s on a tape my cousins mate gave him. All I really remember was a tag matches where one team had guns on their trunks. 

ECW would have been Guilty as Charged 2000. Seeing Mike Awesome throwing Spike around was an eye opener. 

AEW I forget exactly when, but it was part way through Kenny Omega as champ. I think that the first show I saw had Jericho facing ... Nick Gage I think.